You’re not alone in wanting to know how how to improve user experience on your website. A user-friendly website can result in more traffic and happier visitors. However, selecting how to build your site to provide the best user experience is difficult.
What Is User Experience Design?
The experience your clients have while using your product is the goal of UX design. The term “product” refers to more than just the tangible item or service you’re selling; it also refers to the material you develop to reach out to and interact with your customers before they’ve even seen your products.
The purpose of designing a website with the user experience in mind is to guide your visitors through your business in a way that shows them exactly what you want them to see and comprehend at different stages of the purchasing process.
When it comes to the user experience of a physical product, the goal is to provide a one-of-a-kind solution that meets the consumer’s current demand. As the user’s needs change, the product can provide a new solution.
We’ll go through seven techniques to improve the user experience on your website in this article. We’ll provide you several examples along the road, as well as some pointers to get you started.
How to improve user experience
Let’s get started!
1. Think about taking a visual approach.
It’s possible to have too much of a good thing, no matter how high-quality your content is. Visitors who are confronted with a wall of text may feel threatened. This may cause people to overlook your best work.
As a result, you might want to think about taking a more visual, image-based approach. Mixing up your formatting is one method to do this. Even a photo gallery or video might help to break up long content into more manageable chunks. As an extreme illustration of this strategy, consider Pinterest:
A good example of high-quality website photography for enhancing the user experience.
Pinterest makes it simple for consumers to understand material at a glance by focusing on the visual components – even when there are thousands of possibilities. This can improve the user’s experience by making it easier for them to consume content.
Even if you have to rely on a lot of text, attempt to sprinkle photographs and screenshots throughout the document to make it more readable. You can split up an otherwise lengthy text into easier-to-read chunks with only a few photographs.
You can also make an accompanying infographic if you have a text-heavy piece that doesn’t lend itself to extra photos. This format organises all of your textual material into a more readable arrangement.
2. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
You definitely don’t need us to remind you that there are a lot of people using mobile phones these days — 7.1 billion to be exact according to Smart Insights. Because mobile users make up such a large portion of your audience, it’s critical to optimise your site’s mobile experience.
There are a couple of things you can do to make your site more mobile-friendly. Choosing a mobile-responsive theme from the outset is a crucial step. Virtually all modern themes are responsive by default, however we recommend going deeper and evaluating how your theme functions on various devices to ensure the best possible user experience.
It’s also a good idea to plan out your menus thoroughly. Users may struggle to find what they’re looking for if the navigation is cluttered. As a result, consider incorporating a large number of submenus to limit the number of alternatives your consumers must filter through on mobile devices:
You should also look at how much white space you’ve used. Because mobile screens are smaller, they can be more difficult to utilise accurately. A frustrating experience is created when a user continually clicking on the wrong tab due to insufficient spacing. Spacing can go a long way toward alleviating that annoyance.
Finally, let’s discuss speed. Loading times are critical for a seamless navigation experience. However, loading timings on mobile devices may differ from those on desktop computers. You can assure great performance on all devices by using a tool like PageSpeed analytics.
3. Choosing a Call to Action
We’re constantly tinkering with our call-to-action buttons and flow. To adequately optimise, you must first identify the most important action for which you are optimising. For us, the goal is for people to contact us for additional information, therefore everything we do in terms of design and UX supports that goal. A/B test a few different techniques to find what works best once you know what action you want a user to perform.
4. Creating a Community
We’ve made it incredibly easy for visitors to interact with us on numerous social media networks. We include links to our social media accounts on every page, not only because it’s cool, but because social media is where visitors can interact with us and gain a better sense of who we are as a company and a brand.
5. Don’t Overburden Users With Data Entry
It’s terrible to fill out a thousand form fields with garbage before even utilising an app. When it comes to commercial and corporate software, this is a pretty regular occurrence. We feel that business software does not have to stick, so we enter data in a “drip” fashion. Instead of submitting 30 bits of data in 30 minutes, we encourage consumers to input 30 bits of data across 30 days. If we consider the data on cart abandonment for ecommerce websites, we can see the importance that user experience plays.
6. Make liberal use of white space.
Clients have complained on several occasions that their website has too much white space and that this underused real estate should be used to advertise more of their services. White space, on the other hand, is critical to effective design. White space improves readability while also allowing the user to focus on the things around the text.
White space around text and headings, according to Crazy Egg, boosts user attention by 20%. White space may make your website feel spacious, fresh, and modern, and if your branding matches these qualities, it can help you express that sensation to your users. However, one disadvantage of white space to consider is that it does take up room.
Too much white space may be replacing useful information if you’re trying to get a lot of stuff above the fold (the section that is immediately visible without scrolling). The idea is to strike a balance between putting the most relevant information at the top and leaving enough space around it to highlight the image and/or text.
7. Make your page load faster
Waiting too long for a website to load is one of the most aggravating experiences for web users. People are accessing material from all over the world on a variety of platforms thanks to the advent of mobile devices. They anticipate a quick response for the content they desire while browsing online at Starbucks or watching TV on their laptop.
They usually bounce if they don’t get it. Slow page loads are inconvenient for users and can be a source of annoyance; many users just do not have the time to wait.
According to Section.io, a five-second delay in page load time can raise the “bounce rate” of your website by more than 20%, meaning that you loose one out of five visitors.
So, how do you proceed from here? Calculate your score. Google provides a free service that allows you to check the speed of your website. Google will also make recommendations for how to improve your load time on both mobile and desktop.
Start by compressing all of your photos before loading them onto your website to optimise page speed. Image file size is one of the most common causes of slow page speed; companies like compressor.io can help you substantially speed up each of your webpages.
I hope these suggestions have given you some ideas for making your website more user-friendly without spending a lot of money on a complete redesign. Check out our free guide below for additional examples of valuable websites.
We’re experts in ensuring this process is as painless as possible. If you need support and want to find out more about our digital marketing services – contact us for a free consultation wit a member of our team.
